Open: An Autobiography

The fourth set is a foregone conclusion. I keep my foot on the gas and win, 6:4. Pete looks resolved. Too much hill to climb. In fact, he’s maddeningly unruffled as he comes to the net.

It’s my second slam in a row, my third overall. Everyone says it’s my best slam yet, because it’s my first victory over Pete in a slam final. But I think twenty years from now I’ll remember it as my first bald slam.

THE TALK TURNS IMMEDIATELY to my reaching number one. Pete’s been number one for seventy weeks, and everyone on my team says I’m destined to kick him off the top of that vaunted mountain. I tell them that tennis has nothing to do with destiny. Destiny has better things to do than count ATP points.

Still, I make it my goal to be number one, because my team wants it.

I cloister myself in Gil’s gym and train with fury. I tell him about the goal, and he draws up a battle plan. First, he designs a course of study. He sets about collecting a master list of phone numbers and addresses for the world’s most acclaimed sports doctors and nutrition-ists, and reaches out to all of them, turns them into his private consultants. He huddles with experts at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. He flies coast to coast, interviewing the best and brightest, famed researchers on health and wellness, recording every word they tell him in his da Vinci notebooks. He reads everything, from muscle magazines to obscure medical studies and dry reports. He subscribes to the New England Journal of Medicine. In no time he makes himself a portable university, with one professor and one subject.

The student body: me.

Then he determines my physical limit, and pushes me right up to it. He soon has me bench-pressing almost twice my weight, five to seven sets of more than three hundred pounds. He has me lifting fifty-pound dumbbells in excruciating sets of three-ways: back-to-back-to-back flexes that burn three different muscles in my shoulders. Then we work on biceps and triceps. We burn my muscles to ashes. I like when Gil talks about burning muscles, setting them afire. I like being able to put my pyromania to constructive use.

Next we concentrate on my midsection, beginning with a special machine Gil designed and built. As with all his machines, he chopped it, cut it, re-welded it. (The blueprints in his da Vinci notebooks are stunning.) It’s the only machine of its kind in the world, he says, because it allows me to work my abs without engaging my fragile back. We’re going to stack heavy on your abs, he says, work them until they’re on fire, and then we’re going to do Russian Twists: you’ll hold a forty-five-pound iron plate, a big wheel, and rotate left, right, left, right. That will burn down your sides and obliques.

Last, we move to Gil’s homemade lat machine. Unlike every lat machine in every gym the world over, Gil’s doesn’t compromise my back or neck. The bar I pull to work my lats is slightly in front of me. I’m never awkwardly positioned.

While I’m lifting, Gil also feeds me constantly, every twenty minutes. He wants me taking in four parts carbs to one part protein, and he times my intake to the nanosecond. When you eat, he says, and how you eat, that’s the thing. Every time I turn around he’s shoving a bowl of high-protein oatmeal at me, or a bacon sandwich, or a bagel with peanut butter and honey.

Finally, my upper body and gut pleading for mercy, we go outside and run up and down the hill behind Gil’s house. Gil Hill. Quick bursts of power and speed, up and down, up and down, I run until my mind begs me to stop, and then I run some more, ignoring my mind.

Easing into my car at dusk, I often don’t know that I’ll be able to drive home. Sometimes I don’t try. If I don’t have the strength to turn the key in the ignition, I go back inside and curl up on one of Gil’s benches and fall asleep.

After my mini boot camp with Gil, I look as if I’ve traded in my old body, upgraded to the newest model. Still, there’s room for improvement. I could be better about what I eat outside the gym. Gil, however, doesn’t crack the whip about my lapses. He certainly doesn’t like the way I eat when I’m not with him - Taco Bell, Burger King - but he says I need comfort food now and then. My psyche, he says, is more fragile than my back, and he doesn’t want to overstress it. Besides, a man needs one or two vices.

Gil is a paradox, and we both know it. He can lecture me about nutrition while watching me sip a milkshake. He doesn’t slap the milkshake from my hand. On the contrary, he might even take a sip. I like people with contradictions, of course. I also like that Gil’s not a taskmaster. I’ve had enough taskmasters to last me a lifetime. Gil understands me, coddles me, and occasionally - just occasionally - indulges my taste for junk, maybe because he shares it.